


The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself

by Yatzuaka



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Sad-ish, idk guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-31 14:34:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8582170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yatzuaka/pseuds/Yatzuaka
Summary: Darcy's the last in a long line of freaks. She eats fear for a living.





	1. In Touch

**Author's Note:**

> Quick, unbetad and now featuring smutty bits. Vaguely based on [this prompt](http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/153314441519/in-the-year-2187-scientists-have-found-a-way-for).
> 
> In a shocking turn of events there's actually not a single swear in this one. (I know. I'm surprised, too.)

There's nothing to do but peel her glove off, shove it into her pocket and grab Jane's wrist. The draw is immediate, forceful. It doesn't tingle, it hurts. It's under her skin, crawling around, maw open, devouring every rational thought in its path. It's a disorienting rush which soon fades into general sense of unease.

Darcy's kind used to be called sin eaters, but that's not at all what they do. It's fear she eats, though even that is a misnomer. Eating implies she gets some sort of nourishment from it. All she's ever gotten are nightmares and panic attacks.

She's read that it used to be a great honor to receive the touch of her people, a blessing. She's read that thousands burned in the Inquisition, alongside witches and sorcerers and blasphemers. She's read so much and answers, _the_ answer is no closer.

(The question is: How does she deal with this; this gift, this curse, this cruel twist of fate, this genetic abnormality?)

Darcy doesn't usually draw from someone without their consent. But this is Jane, and she's about to get up on stage and accept her Nobel fricking prize, and Darcy is not about to let something like fear ruin her friends speech.

"You're gonna knock 'em dead," Darcy assures her now calm and collected ex-boss.

Dr Jane Foster shoots her a grateful smile, mouths _thank you_ and sweeps onto the stage like she had been born to wear the incongruous high heels and silk ball gown. 

Sometimes, these sorts of times specifically, _it_ , the draw, was worth it. 

* * *

On rare occasions Darcy forgets what it's like to feel her own fear. That's usually when the universe, or fate, or whatever it was decided to give her a reminder. Hubris, her grandmother used to say, was the greatest foe of them all. Comfort with or dependence on the status quo was always a mistake. All ways.

Her Grandmother would know. Her family had been comfortable in Germany, even after the Nazis took over. How historians would like to know the secrets that woman had held. Darcy doesn't know it all, she'd only glimpsed a bit, guessed a bit. Her grandmother's fear sat heavy in her skull for months after her death. Sometimes it feels like it's still there, but it doesn't threaten to overwhelm her as much anymore.

Darcy has her own fears now.

* * *

How many times does she have to explain it?

"It doesn't work like that," she says, slowly, clearly. 

The pair, a Dom and and Sub, stare at her blankly, before offering even more money. 

There is not enough money in the world to entice her to play sexual middleman between the two of them, even if BDSM had been her kink, which it wasn't. "I take, I can't give," she explains, while the Dom tries to talk over her.

Darcy stands - she's had enough. The Sub flutters and titters, upset that the fantasy scenario these two had concocted was never going to happen. Normally, the service she used to coordinate her appointments weeded out the looky-loos and kooks, but apparently they couldn't catch them all. 

The city outside the sedate brownstone the couple lived in was beset by a cold wind that cut through the jacket she was still tugging on. There's still one more place to visit before she can go home, and it's going to be a tough one. It's a freebie, and part of her wishes she could skip out, but... it's important.

Walking might clear her thoughts, so she digs out her beanie, settles it on her head and puts one foot in front of the other, trudging through the thick slush on the sidewalk.

Her feet go numb long before she reaches her destination. Darcy wishes her whole body was numb. Her mind, her soul. The hospital her feet have taken her to looms ahead, and Darcy sucks it up and pastes on her brightest smile. 

Sometimes she wishes she was less different. This is not one of those times. She considers this a sacred duty, the one thing she does that really makes a difference. The nurses at the station know her, or know of her, and most of them are very nice. She tends to ignore the ones who aren't, the ones who cross themselves at the sight of her, because in Darcy's opinion, the Pediatric Cancer Ward is not the place for religious persecution.

The kids don't even know what she does, not really. They just know she shows up and holds their hands for a bit while reading from the Hobbit. They just know that they aren't as scared to get hooked up to the machines everyone hopes will keep them alive. 

Even as hard as it is to keep a straight face, not to cry when one of the littles passes on, to keep smiling, it's worth it in the end to know that she did what she could to make it easier.

* * *

She's pulling on her gloves when someone knocks into her. Everything goes flying. Her purse and it's contents, her outerwear, the glove. Darcy gets down on her knees to scoop everything back into order, and it's a struggle to keep her composure settled and serene. 

A masculine hand, starkly white with long fingers she can easily imagine tickling the ivories, brushes against hers briefly. She flinches, braces herself against the inevitable draw, but nothing happens. 

"Sorry," a voice says, tinged with posh Britishness. 

She looks up, curiosity burning about this person, the only person she'd met who didn't leak fear into her skin at the slightest contact.

He's got a face like a male model and a body to match under those powder blue scrubs, if she wasn't mistaken. 

"No, it's my fault, wasn't paying attention to where I was going," she responds, belatedly.

Her things have been restored to their proper places, the glove shoved into a pocket while she stares like an impolite moron.

Without meaning to, Darcy sticks out her hand, her bare, uncovered hand, "Darcy Lewis. Nice to meet you."

Had it been a fluke? 

His hand meets hers, and all she feels is the pressure of his grip.

"Walter Lawson," the man responds, green eyes twinkling in a way that sets her foolish heart fluttering. "And may I just say, the pleasure is all mine."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Walter Lawson is one of Loki's aliases, according to the Marvel wiki.


	2. Surprise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't even mean to write this, but here we are. Upped rating for sex.

It wasn't like she didn't know what a date was. She'd been the one who asked for, "Coffee or something?"

It was just that dating wasn't really her thing. Understandably. The whole 'no skin to skin contact' tended to deter potential suitors. That wasn't to say that she hadn't had sex before, because she had, it was just that the kind of sex she could have was generally speaking pretty unsatisfying. Fully clothed, standing up in a bathroom or hallway...

Darcy was absolutely her own best lover. 

This guy, though, this guy was singular. Of every human she'd touched over the course of her lifetime, he was special. Luckily for her, he was spectacularly beautiful. On the flip side, he was drop dead gorgeous, and Darcy was... a practically blind, short brunette with big tits who'd kissed all of two people in 28 years because she was _special_. 

Her heart clenched in her chest when he said yes, but she chose to ignore it. 

* * *

They had coffee at her favorite doughnut shop. Darcy panicked just a little when he grabbed her wrist to steal her hand and the doughnut she was holding to his mouth, but still she felt nothing. Under fluorescent lights, in a cramped booth upholstered with vinyl that stuck to your clothes and made fart noises when you slid across the seat, she swore she felt something inside shift. Like a space had been cleared. 

Walter Lawson, so beautiful, so poorly named it almost felt like a mockery. He'd been wearing an ID badge at the hospital, but that hardly validated it as _real_. Still, she let the doubts slip away as he looked at her from across the table and smiled.

It felt like the smudge of frosting lingering at the corner of his mouth was somehow obligatory, like its presence was merely the layup to a well-worn, played out moment. But she ignored it, how purposeful it felt. Because of course she did (she was lonely, he was incredibly, breathtakingly handsome, and he was paying attention to _her_.)

She hadn't even managed to stop thinking of him as Walter-Lawson, much less a diminutive form of it, and here it was, the moment where she paid special notice to his mouth. Where she either leaned over and kissed the errant frosting away, or maybe reached over and wiped it gently with her fingertips. The moment she decided to sleep with him, even if it wasn't a conscious choice. 

"You've got a little something right there," Darcy says instead, to be contrary, gesturing to the corner or her mouth.

He looks down, and maybe she imagines that his lips tighten, right before he uses a napkin to swipe at his lips. "I've enjoyed spending time with you," he says, and there's a command in his voice, a tone that resonates all the way down her spine. "May I walk you home?"

* * *

"I don't usually do this," she says later, as they paw at each other, slipping clothes out of the way to get to bare skin. She'd never quite imagined the glory of simple, uncomplicated touch, and it makes her clumsy in her greed. Clumsier, rather, because she's never exactly been known for being especially graceful. 

He laughs, and there's a note of something that borders on manic in his agreement. It's startles her to think that someone like this, someone as beautiful as Walter-Lawson would be as desperately starved for touch as she is. (She can't stop thinking how much he doesn't suit his name, Walter-Lawson. She resolutely thinks through alternatives, Walter-Walt-Wally, but she can't stop knowing _it doesn't fit_.)

His fingers are cold against her skin, trailing paths that make her flesh sing and her head empty. Is this what people do? Is this what it means to get caught up in a moment - this floaty, flighty impatience? 

Darcy moans as his mouth finds her breast, feeling nothing but the suction and warmth, the tug and pull and faint bite of teeth. The lack of fear makes her giddy and breathless. His dark hair is smooth and doesn't tangle between her fingers as she tries to hold him in place. _Walter_ (why does it take such an effort to think of him that way?) smiles up at her. she can feel it against her skin, the way his mouth tightens, and when he looks up at her, she grins back.

They wind up in her bed, familiar with its messy sheets and piles of laundry sitting just over there. It doesn't squeak, but the mattress does seem to sigh under their combined weight. Darcy pulls him close to kiss him again, because she can, because it doesn't echo inside with someone else's regrets, because it feels so good. 

She doesn't think, she just lets instinct drive her, relenting to the sort of primal urge she's read about, but never thought to experience. Darcy pushes him flat against the mattress, crawls up his body, letting her skin brush up against his. Walter-Lawson seems to be breathing heavily, chest expanding and contracting with the effort. If she's honest with herself, that she's having this effect on him is fairly satisfying in its own right. 

There's a moment, when she slides down his cock the first time, where she swears her perception of him warps. (His hair is long and dark, and his eyes are a green she doesn't know the name of, and he's not Walter-Lawson. He's not even a _he_ , also not a she, is xe both? It's all confusing, and too much. She lets it go.) Besides, it's a blink of an eye, and it's more interesting here outside her thoughts; he's hard and full inside her, his hands squeezing hard enough at her hips to bruise, so she lets the image fade from her mind on the tide of pleasure and passion.

* * *

Darcy sleeps deeply, wakes refreshed. Stretching against her sheets, she'd expected, hoped, to find Walter-Lawson there. 

Instead there's a note on her pillow.

She knows (thinks?) he's a doctor, but his handwriting isn't illegible at all, which perhaps makes the contents all the more disappointing. 

_You're lovely._

_I'm sorry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to everyone who reviewed. I'm sorry for not responding individually, but know that I appreciate it, and it's not you. It's totally me and my anxiety issues messing with my head.


	3. Hollow

This could be the part where Darcy rails at the unfairness of it all, where she falls apart in a cataclysmic display of grief, rending her hair and beating her breasts at his absence. Or it could be where she stifles quiet sobs, heart breaking with loss.

It's not. 

Despite a fondness for dramatic displays, Darcy is, at her core, essentially a pragmatist.

This is what she does: strip her sheets efficiently and take it as a sign that it's probably best to do her laundry.

Walter-Lawson amounts to nothing more than a possibility, and he had been a slim one at that. She'd pinned nothing on him but hope, had expected nothing of him. Spaces cleared could (would) be filled by something else.

He was sorry, but she didn't know for what precisely. (Any of the possibilities she thought of were equally untenable; sorry for meeting her, sorry for sleeping with her, sorry for leaving when tomorrow hadn't even been mentioned, much less promised. If he thought she needed him to be sorry for taking off, he was mistaken.)

The note ends up in her trash three times before she slips it into a book and determinedly forgets about it. If her thoughts drift to him, it's as simple redirecting them to safer shores. (Her dreams are another matter entirely - she's given up on policing them long ago.)

Darcy gets on with the business of living. She goes to her appointments, removes her gloves and takes what isn't wanted. If the fear sits heavier than it had, it's not a weight that would break her. 

Maybe it was better to have loved and lost, but she'd never gotten far enough to love Walter-Lawson, so she wouldn't know.

She doesn't see him around the hospital again and she likes to imagine that it doesn't matter. She likes to pretend she doesn't look for him, but that would be a lie, though there is a bit of pride in the fact that she doesn't ask around about him. That's not to say his presence doesn't loom in those sterile hallways, that it doesn't linger in the colorful rooms she's admitted to. 

"He said you'd make me feel better, and you did," the girl without hair tells her matter of factly. "Thank you."

Darcy almost asks who he is, but ultimately decides it's better not to know.

* * *

It's months later. Spring is giving way to summer. It's muggy and the heat sticks to her like tape, and she finds herself perversely missing the slush of snow on the sidewalks. The TV in her client's living room is playing an endless loop of speeches memorializing the Attack on New York, interspersed with footage of the attack itself. 

The client prattles on about inconsequentials, as some do when faced with the very real possibility of her ability. Darcy sips tea and nods when it seems appropriate, her attention drifting dangerously. 

Something on the screen snags her notice, the banal trivialities of her client forgotten as she stares. _It's him_ , some part of her brain informs her higher consciousness. _Him. Her. Xe. It's them._

The tea spreads an ugly stain on an equally ugly carpet after the cup falls from her nerveless fingers. Her excuses and apologies fill the room gone suddenly quiet. She leaves without fulfilling her duty, she won't get paid, but she can survive the loss of money, make it up to the client another day. The question is whether she'll survive the truth of Walter-Lawson. 

She knows the precise moment she last ran outside of a gym. London, the spring of 2011. 

Her hair trails behind her as she runs now. She's sweating and twitchy and the one person who could possibly understand is long dead. Her grandmother's crypt is set in a small Jewish cemetery in New Jersey, so it's impossible she ran the whole way, but she doesn't remember taking a train or bus or taxi.

It's quiet and empty there surrounded by marble and inscriptions and flowers dying. The bench she sits on is hard an uncomfortable, but for the first time since she woke up alone, she is able to admit to herself that Walter-Lawson's abrupt disappearance hurt her, but nowhere near as much as finding out she was right. (His name isn't Walter Lawson at all. It's Loki.)

There's a hollow inside she thought she'd been filling with other people's fears, but also with the things that comfort her; laughter and coffee and the normal things that normal people do. 

It's not that she can't cry. It's that she won't. She didn't do anything wrong. She, for one, is _not_ sorry. Not about that one night where she got to be just _Darcy_ , lovely and desired and fearless. 

New York is as it always has been, ever-changing and without regard for its inhabitants, as Darcy makes her way back from the silence of the tiny cemetery in New Jersey. She's wearing headphones, big ones that cover her ears and keep out noise, her heartbeat a faint echo in her head.

She gives the homeless guy on her street a crumpled five from her purse and walks up the creaking stairs to her apartment. There's someone sitting on the steps when she turns the corner to her floor. 

It's him. Of course it's him. 

She doesn't smile. (Her heart doesn't stop or stutter or do anything foolish at all.)

He's got a question on his face and the stairwell isn't the place for it. It's possible _nowhere_ is the place for it, but she's curious and maybe what doesn't kill her, will actually make her stronger. She ushers him in. 


	4. Pennies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this before I chicken out. I know it's short, but I hope you still enjoy it.

There's a taste in her mouth like pennies, a coppery tang she recognizes as blood. Her cheek aches a little from where she bit it, trying to shut up. There's an avalanche of words desperate to get out, but Darcy has learned the value of silence somewhere along the line. 

The man who wasn't Walter-Lawson (the man who wasn't a man at all) takes up too much room in her tiny apartment. He wears the face that isn't his, but is similar enough that she feels stupid for not recognizing it sooner.

As the quiet between them stretches, brittle like an old elastic band, Darcy just wishes he'd get on with it already. 

"You're wondering why I'm here," Loki says finally, and if there was a more obvious statement than that, Darcy would be hard-pressed to find it. 

She nods, because if she speaks even a single syllable, the dam would break and she's not sure she'd ever be able to stem the proverbial tide again. He has the good sense to look slightly embarrassed, which she counts as a point in his favor. (He's starting somewhere near negative infinity, so there's little progress.)

"Where should I start?" he asks, as if she would know. There's a bit of exasperation in his voice, and she's not sure anymore if she resents him more for existing in the first place or for intruding into her life. 

It's a gamble, but it's clear he won't start talking until she says something. She doesn't need to know everything, she doesn't want to burdened with it, so she doesn't suggest that he start at the beginning, she simply says, "The hospital."

It's not what he'd expected, Darcy suspects, but he nods like he understands what she didn't request, and tells her how much he feared that he wasn't doing enough. (Enough for what, exactly, she wonders, but keeps that question to herself.) He stutters through describing encounters with men and women he met at the hospital, when he couldn't take being alone in his head anymore.

Darcy listens, and he keeps glancing at her, as if unsure of how she would react. There's so much he describes that she recognizes in herself, a sense of isolation, the ways in which he is not the same as anybody else, and particularly, himself. "Which is strange, of anybody, I should be the most like me, but I'm not. Not anymore."

It's different than what she normally does, this listening, but she feels his fears settle inside just the same. She hears what he doesn't say, and despite her wish to remain unburdened by him, she finds out just enough to feel the curiosity burning. The unspoken fear of his lights up his face as surely as a sunrise, and for all her wisdom, her good sense, she pokes at the looming, unnamed thing with a question she thinks he wouldn't answer. He hesitates for so long, she thinks he'll avoid it entirely, but he doesn't.  

She wishes she hadn't asked at all, later. It's a fear that has a spine like steel and sharp teeth, and she understands suddenly, viscerally, why he is the way he is. His boogeyman lives, is coming, has a better grip on him than he has of himself. Forgiveness isn't an equation that can be measured and balanced by an equal force of good to the bad, but it helps. It helps when one realizes that there are unforgivable sins, and nothing will ever change what came before, to still try.

The sun has gone down, and the fireworks boom across the city. He starts at the sounds of the explosions, and her hand settles gently across his. It's as cool as she remembers (as she dreamed) and it's as much a comfort for her as it is for him. The interrupted silence is as light as silk now, a shroud. 

Forgiveness isn't hers to give, and as much as she wants to judge him for his mistakes and choices, that isn't her purview either. She's a sin-eater. Stones are not hers to cast, nor to understand. They are hers to carry.

He leaves when the fog of smoke settles heavy on the streets. He doesn't promise to be back, but Darcy knows that he regrets that he can't. (You're lovely. I'm sorry.)

Darcy watches from her window as Loki fades into the scene below her like a ghost, indistinguishable from everyone else who is walking home on this night for remembrances and celebrations.

* * *

Her routine is uninterrupted for months, through the dog days of summer into the brisk winds of fall. She walks the corridors of the hospital, but she allows herself to look for him, allows that it might not be a weakness to feel a need for someone else.

A nurse is showing someone she doesn't recognize around, and their paths cross as Darcy waits for the elevator. The new doctor is tall and lithe; beautiful, eyes too green to be real, and Darcy knows that it is Loki who shakes her hand, despite the female face she wears. Her finger draws a shape on Darcy's wrist, above her glove. It feels like nothing and everything, and Darcy smiles. 

"Coffee?" Darcy asks, heart beating a million miles an hour. 

"I'd love to."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck if I know if I'll write more in this 'verse, but let's just leave it here for now.
> 
> All the love to everyone who kudo'd and commented and read this. Thanks for the support on this weird little journey. You're the best.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
